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Outside the Government: Mona Lisa’s Revenge

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It’s November 12th, 2009. JLS are at number one with “Everybody in Love,” with Ke$ha, Cheryl Cole, Westlife, and Lady Gaga also charting. In news, Hugo Chavez tells Venezuela to “prepare for war” against Colombia, the US House of Representatives passes the first version of the health care law these days more commonly known as Obamacare, and, in a desperate attempt to get a third news item, Willie Bain wins the Glasgow North East by-election.
While on television, it’s Mona Lisa’s Revenge. It is difficult to get around the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge features the TARDIS as the Mona Lisa. That this involves certain eccentricities of chronology does not even seem like much of a problem: after all, in The Doctor’s Wife one of the major conceits is that the TARDIS does not experience time chronologically, and thus there is no particular reason why the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge was made two years earlier should have any bearing on the causality here.
We must also admit that Mona Lisa’s Revenge ties in conspicuously with City of Death, the previous time that Doctor Who has intersected the Mona Lisa. From that we know that the Mona Lisa that comes to life here is, if not a fake, at least not strictly speaking the original – that da Vinci in fact painted six additional versions on canvases onto which the Doctor had scrawled “this is a fake” in felt tip marker. 
This latter fact is worth stressing simply because back when we dealt with City of Death, one of our primary concerns was the fact that it was a story about the nature of authenticity – what Walter Benjamin deemed “aura” in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” That is to say, City of Death is a story about the strange and quasi-mystical allure of the authentic object. The thing that has been touched by the hand of the artist, as it were. Mona Lisa’s Revenge, for all that it is an odd bedfellow to that story, is firmly in the same tradition.
After all, the key event of the story is the presence of the Mona Lisa – the fact that it is on loan from the Louvre, and in the UK. The museum is drenched with Mona Lisa merchandise, and the story thus stresses in a number of ways how many copies and imitations of the image there are. But what’s important is the fact that the Mona Lisa – the one that comes to life and turns out to be rather evil – is the one that Leonardo da Vinci painted. Indeed, the explanation for what’s going on in this story, such as it is, hinges entirely on the medial reality of the painting. The Mona Lisa comes to life because she was painted with paint that happened to have alien rocks in it, or something like that. The explanation is terribly vague, but the underlying point stands: everything that happens in this story stems from the physical object of the Mona Lisa.
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“But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.”: The Enterprise Incident # 5

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Connected to the Preserver interface device, Spock relives an encounter with his father on Vulcan where they both exhibit a manner of tension over Spock’s decision to stay in Starfleet instead of returning to work at the Vulcan Science Academy. In the present, Kirk, McCoy and Scotty monitor the experiment from one of the Enterprise‘s science labs. After Arex detects a massive random energy spike centered around the device and McCoy warns him that Spock’s central nervous system is about to collapse as a result, Kirk has the interface destroyed and beamed out into space, but not before Spock was able to determine that it was the Preservers who constructed the galactic barrier (a ribbon of energy at the boundary of the Milky Way galaxy that was the focus of a number of Original Series episodes). While he wasn’t able to determine the exact purpose, Spock believes the Preservers intended it to protect the younger peoples of the galaxy, and that they hoped one day it would no longer be necessary.

</The Galactic Barrier evokes a number of episodes, but perhaps the most telling are “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Beyond the Farthest Star”, the first episodes of both the Original Series and the Animated Series. In the former episode, crossing the barrier caused Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner to suddenly transform into Godlike beings who, drunk on their newfound power, immediately set about trying to crush the entire universe beneath them. While it wasn’t mentioned in the latter episode, recall that a key aspect of the reading we afforded “Beyond the Farthest Star” was that the Enterprise crew, and thus Star Trek, had grown to a point where it could leave the galaxy behind and begin the next stage of its journey. In other words, leaving the galaxy can be seen as a sign of a particular wisdom and maturity, but also a source of great power that is inconceivably dangerous and destructive if misused, a reading reinforced by the presence of Ayelbourne at the last Preserver outpost./>

Determining the location of the last Preserver outpost, Kirk has the Enterprise race to try and beat Kor to it. However, as soon as they arrive, Kirk, Spock and Arex are whisked away to a chamber bathed in soft white light by Ayelbourne, the elder Organian who played a pivotal role in forcing the Klingons and the Federation to sign the Treaty of Organia in “Errand of Mercy”. Kirk and Spock are furious that Ayelbourne refused to show himself earlier, but Ayelbourne counters that his people have decided their intervention in the affairs of the galactic empires has done more harm then good. The Organians, he reveals, are one of a handful of peoples who are tasked with preserving the knowledge and memory of the Elder Races, infinitely old cultures from the dawn of time, of whom the Preservers are one, who left behind relics that, it was hoped, could be of use to the younger civilizations were they to reach specific points in their development.…

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Curdled to Sea Foam (The Last War in Albion Part 33: The Reversible Man and Chrono-Cops)

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This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s flagging middle period of short stories for IPC came to a fortuitous end with the introduction of the Time Twisters line of stories, which provided his work with a renewed energy.
The flood of animal emotions surging in the street. Present desires precipitated. Curdled to a sea foam. – Alan Moore, The Highbury Working
Figure 247: The narrator of “The Reversible Man” sees his wife for the last
time. (From “The Reversible Man,” written by Alan Moore, art by Mike
White, in 2000 AD #308, 1983)
Moore has commented that “The Reversible Man” was “pathetically easy to write,” and that he was as a result surprised by its reception, speculating that its popularity was because “the events of our lives become dulled by reputation and it takes an unusual view of them for us to see life and its emotional implications anew,” disclaiming that the story’s success “had very little to do with me as a writer.” This is, perhaps, false modesty, however – elsewhere he proclaims it “one of the best stories I’ve ever done,” and boasts of how “during their lunch hour, the day that came out, it had all the secretaries weeping.” But even in that interview, where he breathlessly describes the emotional effect of how “an ordinary little scene of two people meeting, their first meeting… becomes their final departure,” he suggests that the story came mainly out of his inclination to “do something to see what will happen” and to experiment within the confines of the format. 
The story may have been straightforward to write, but the suggestion that there is no writerly skill involved in its success is clearly untrue. Much of the story’s power comes not just from the way in which it frames the events of a man’s life, but in its specific choices of what events to frame and how to frame them. For instance, when the narrator’s father is dug up and brought to the hospital and eventually goes home, the narrator’s mother, understandably, moves out to live with her newly un-dead husband. The narration describes how “they took several of our things with them to furnish their home. Mostly antique furniture. We didn’t mind.” The choice of the furniture as a detail for this reversed event – the death of the narrator’s father – is a carefully chosen one. There are many things that accompany the death of a parent, but the choice of a mundane, material thing like dealing with their old furniture is a well-chosen one, such that the word “antiques” speaks volumes.
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Outside the Government: The Eternity Trap

, 35

It’s November 5th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one with “Fight For This Love,” with Michael Buble, Robbie Williams, and two separate songs by the Black Eyed Peas also charting. In news, Rhode Island re-criminalizes prostitution, the Yankees win the World Series, and a U2 concert at the Brandenberg Gate celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall finds itself mired in a strange and ironic controversy as a large wall is build around the venue. 
“I hope this sci-fi show does a story about the conflict between rationalism and superstition,” said no one ever, and yet the wish is still granted for the umpteenth time in The Eternity Trap. The story is not bad – it’s a perfectly competent execution of “let’s do The Stone Tape for children,” managing to be a spooky haunted house story without ever crossing the line into objectionable or overly scarring. There’s something a little sad in the fact that it doesn’t try to scar children for life, but equally, The Sarah Jane Adventures doing a haunted house story probably should target fun instead of traumatic, so, you know. Plus, it’s got Donald Sumpter, who is positively gifted in the art of playing a raving and frothing bad guy named something like “Erasmus Darkening.” 
It’s also worth noting that The Eternity Trap takes a more ambiguous line on the science/superstition debate than is normal. Clear care has been taken in making Darkening inscrutable. The number of times the narrative goes “ah, yes, this may behave 100% like a supernatural event, but actually it’s got a vague scientific explanation” is impressive. No, the creature isn’t an unknowable monster… it’s just a completely unknown one from some parallel dimension. No, Darkening isn’t an alchemist. He’s actually an alien… from a totally unknown planet who created “a computer built from brass and iron,” a phrase that still carefully ties it to the 17th century period it ostensibly hails from. No, the house isn’t haunted by ghosts, because technically the people only got spirited to another dimension as opposed to dying. There’s a constant resistance to completely ceding ground to rationalism even as the underlying ethos of the episode is explicitly rationalist. 
This is, for the most part, more interesting. The arch-skeptical ideology is, let’s face it, boring. But more to the point, it’s preposterous within The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is in no way a rationalist show. I mean, this is the dirty little secret of every single sci-fi show to try to push the hardline rationalist perspective. Sci-fi isn’t rationalist. The Sarah Jane Adventures sure as heck isn’t. I mean, this is straightforward on a basic level. If you flop off to, say, RationalWiki or FreethoughtBlogs and start talking about how all those people who believe in ghosts are cranks because it’s obviously aliens that’s actually done it, you’re not going to be taken seriously. The conspiracy theories that say that the Illuminati is a front for the mind controlling space lizards are not, in point of fact, any more sane than the ones that go with more old-fashioned “it’s paranormal.”
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“Dream not of today.”: The Enterprise Incident # 4

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</I am now convinced I am being haunted by Margaret Armen. I keep running into her just after I think I’m finally rid of having to square away her influence for good. All that said, she has indeed cropped up once more so it’s time to look at her work yet again. I have to say, invoking Margaret Armen in any capacity other then “vehemently trying to pretend her scripts didn’t happen” is always going to seem a bit suspect to me. Nevertheless, she was one of the most seasoned and experienced writers of the period of Star Trek history, and considering she contributed almost as many stories to the Animated Series as she did to the Original Series it would seem D.C. Fontana was considerably more enamoured of her work than I am./>

Beneath the surface of Loren 5, Kirk and the Enterprise away team discover what Sanderson and his team had found while mining for Dilithium and what Kor’s crew was after: A sprawling underground city that seems ancient and deserted, and yet built around scientific and technological concepts far beyond the comprehension of any of the major galactic powers. As they search the site for clues, Kirk and Spock eventually locate what is likely to be the source of the city’s power and import: A gigantic Preserver obelisk, much like the one that stripped Kirk of his memory back in “The Paradise Syndrome”. Oh dear.

</The best way to approach this, or at least the only way I can think of that’s not horrible and soul-crushing, is to presume Fontana saw something in Armen’s work that I don’t, and that this is why she brought her back time and time again and why she gave her a nod in this story along frankly far more deserving candidates like Gene Coon and Nicholas Meyer. Armen was, of course, the only other regular female writer on either the Original Series or the Animated Series. This didn’t have to be the case: Both shows had very promising talent in people like Joyce Muskat, Joyce Perry, Jean Lisette Aroeste, Shari Lewis and Judy Burns who were, for whatever reason, never asked to come back despite many of the absolute best and most beloved episodes of either show being their work. And that’s not getting into the rabidly loyal and obscenely talented people in the fanfiction community, any of whom Fontana could have cherry-picked for the Animated Series in a heartbeat at any time. But be that as it may, the only significant female voice we get on “official”, “canon” Star Trek apart from D.C. Fontana until the 1980s is Margaret Armen./>

I know “The Enterprise Experiment” is a massive bit of fanwank, but of all the people whose work Fontana could have pulled from, I’m at a complete loss to explain why one of them had to be Margaret Armen, a writer whose track record on Star Trek can charitably called “disastrous”. I’ve never understood why “The Paradise Syndrome” was considered such a beloved episode of the Original Series (well, actually I do, but I try to pretend I don’t to preserve my enthusiasm for this franchise and project, not to mention my faith in humanity in general): One could, I suppose, read the Kirk/Miramanee love story as an early version of the much more famous, and, for all its other faults, frankly better, manifestation of this kind of story in Carol and David Marcus in the Original Series movies.…

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Spike and Rape Culture

44

A bit ago, someone gave me cause to write a brief thing about Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and particularly the way in which his character is handled after the moment he sexually assaults Buffy towards the end of Season Six

Here, for me, is the interesting thing about Spike. And I don’t think this is quite the reading that Whedon intended for Spike, but I think it’s close, and makes Spike an astonishing metaphor for rape culture and what it does. And, actually, the sort of approach to rape culture that could only really be pioneered by a feminist man, which interests me on several levels.

I mean, let’s be unambiguous here. Rape culture, as an idea and a critique, needed to be developed by women. Men are a support class in feminism, and this is as it should be. That’s the point. But equally, there are perspectives within the discussion that are both male and relevant. And I think the depiction of Spike is one of them.

The key thing, to me, about the bathroom rape scene is what Spike does next, which is to go on an extended quest for his soul. Because this ties into an important thematic narrative about vampires in Buffy, which is that they are true monsters. There are clearly shells of people wrapped up in them, but they’re explicitly irredeemable. Angel, somewhere or other, describes the demonic aspect of vampires as taking everything you are and twisting it, and fine, but let’s dig deeper here and note that the overall sense is that vampires are slaves to some external narrative about what vampires do.

Because it’s not just hunger in Buffy. It’s not just that vampires feed on innocents and have to. It’s not just temptation. These are the usual themes of vampire fiction, but Buffy mostly avoids them. Vampires in Buffy are visibly compelled into a larger narrative of evil deeds. They seem unable to resist becoming servants of powerful overlords with schemes for, at best, world domination, and at worst, things like the complete destruction of the planet. The state of soullessness means enslavement to a particular cultural narrative.

This is the recurring narrative for Spike. Even when he starts to redeem himself in Season Four, he’s redeemed by external force: by a chip in his brain that keeps him from indulging in the worst aspects of the narrative that his demon prescribes for him. It makes him less bad, but only in an instrumental way, in the same way that criminalizing rape sometimes locks predators up before they harm a second or third or fifth or twelfth person, but does fuck all to actually stop them from their first rape.

But somewhere in the course of his story, in looking in horror at what he’s done to Buffy, he changes. He rejects the narrative prescribed for him and seeks the power to write his own narrative. With Angel, the soul becomes a binary switch. Have one and you’re good, don’t have one and you’re not.…

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Outside the Government: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

, 26

It’s October 29th, 2009. Cheryl Cole is at number one, with Whitney Houston, Black Eyed Peas, Michael Buble, Jay-Z, and Robbie Williams also charting. In news, Morrissey collapses while performing “This Charming Man” in Swindon. Zine El Abine Ben Ali wins 90% of the votes in Tunisia and a five-year term of office, which seems like a sure bet that he’ll be around for ages. And footballer Marlon King is sacked from Wigan Athletic after a sexual assault conviction.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The biggest thing about this story is, of course, that the Doctor is in it. That this is demonstrably the most important thing about it is also in many regards the fundamental challenge of it: how does one do an episode of a spin-off to Doctor Who that features the Doctor and not have it become a de facto episode of Doctor Who instead of an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The first trick is a relatively obvious one: make the Doctor’s absence a tangible part of the plot. After teasing his appearance repeatedly in The Mad Woman in the Attic, we have a first episode here in which the sound of the TARDIS is in effect used as a sort of accent and punctuation: something that repeatedly teases the eventual arrival of the Doctor. It’s only the second episode in which Tennant features at all, and even there he effectively drops out of the climax so that Clyde can save the day instead. Tennant, in other words, is deliberately treated as something to use sparingly, so that this feels unmistakably like an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures and not like an episode of Doctor Who that went out with the wrong opening credits.
It is, of course, questionable whether or not this was necessary. There is in the end nothing that would have effectively made this anything other than a story where the guest star overwhelms the show. And in some ways that’s the real point of it: a private episode of Doctor Who for the kids. There is, after all, something thoroughly delightful in that idea. The usually not actually true statement that Doctor Who is for children (as opposed to the reality, which is that it is a show that carefully avoids not being for children) here applies wonderfully. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is a secret treat for kids – something that feels a bit like staying up past your bedtime.
In something of a concession to this reality, the second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith revels in these possibilities. Indeed, much of its runtime is devoted to a longer sequence of the Doctor running around with Clyde, Luke, and Rani than the plot actually needs – a sequence that exists mostly, if we’re being honest, to set up things like Clyde actually calling the Doctor out on an “I’ll explain later.” Which is wonderful and worth doing, to be fair.
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“Confessions of a King”: The Enterprise Experiment # 3

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Commander Kor is not happy. He sits soliloquizing on the bridge of his battlecruiser reflecting on his humiliating defeat the the hands of the Organians and the Federation three years ago, a defeat which brought shame and dishonour upon his house. Decoding a message from Starfleet Command about a rich Dilithium deposit and mysterious and ancient archaeological ruins discovered on Loren 5, Kor sees this as the perfect opportunity to test the resolve of the Organians and the Federation both and moves to launch a full-scale invasion of the mining colony.

</As if the brutal fistfight between Captain Kirk and a Klingon on the cover of this month’s Star Trek: Year Four-The Enterprise Incident wasn’t a tip-off, the Klingons are back because of course the Klingons are back. In particular Kor, and in particular the pacifism debates from “Errand of Mercy” and “Day of the Dove”. But even so, what little we see of Kor in this issue is indicative of a minor, yet significant, reconstruction effort Fontana seems to have pulled. He’s behaviour is naturally very much more in keeping with the post-“Heart of Glory” or “A Matter of Honor” Klingons (or I suppose it’d be more accurate to say post-“Blood Oath” as Kor himself was featured so prominently in that one) rather than the Original Series Klingons, though do recall “Day of the Dove” proper had laid a lot of this groundwork already. But what’s more interesting to me is Kor’s desire to test the resolve of the Organians and the Federation:/>

Of all the Klingon characters to bring back from the Original Series, Kor seems like the best choice for the story Fontana seems to want to tell. “The Enterprise Experiment” is very much going down the road of problematizing Star Trek’s fixation, or perceived fixation, on valour and militarism, and that sort of critique takes us right back to “Errand of Mercy”. From the perspective of the Organians, who will likely go on to play extremely significant roles in the resolution of this story, Kirk and Kor were effectively representing the same viewpoints. Unlike as was the case with both Romulan Commanders though, we’re *not* meant to feel sympathetic to the captains in “Errand of Mercy”: These were not ordinary people who were victims of time and circumstance, these were people who committed reprehensible acts in the name of their respective empires and forced a third party to intervene and put an end to their warlike predilections. Bringing Kor back here is in fact significant, and reinforces the positive light the Romulan Commander was cast in last time.

</This is very much the kind of thing warriors do to people they consider equals, or people who they wish to see if they can consider equals. Kor is issuing a warrior’s challenge to Kirk (he hasn’t met Kirk yet in the story, but we all know that’s who he’s thinking of) and the Organians to see if they can earn the right to be called worthy adversaries.…

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Saturday Waffling (February 22nd, 2014)

12

Well. This has been a week.

Let’s see.

Jed Blue is Kickstarting the second volume of My Little Po-Mo over here. Jed is good people. You should consider helping him out.

This raises a plausible and interesting question: what’s worth supporting these days? Whether it be Kickstarters, charitable causes, political causes, or whatnot, what are some things you think are worth spending money to support?…

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Outside the Government: The Mad Woman in the Attic

, 14

It’s October 22nd, 2009. Alexandra Burke and Flo Rida are at number one with “Bad Boys,” with Robbie Williams, Black Eyed Peas, and Michael Buble also charting. In news, about all I can actually find over the last week is the balloon boy hoax in Colorado. Oh, and Jenson Button wins the Formula One Drivers’ Champion. All right then.
So, television – another installment of The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is in some ways surprising that The Mad Woman in the Attic is a relatively messy and underwhelming story, not least because it’s by Joseph Lidster, who wrote the best Sarah Jane Adventures story to date with Mark of the Berserker last season. And yet it is, in fact, a mess. It’s not entirely clear what the problem is. It’s certainly possible that it’s just down to some performances that, while not bad as such, are also not quite up to the level they need to be. Neither Souad Faress as the adult Rani nor Eleanor Tomlinson as the alien Eve quite persuade. It’s not that their performances are bad in any specifically memorable way, but they are equally not particularly compelling or nuanced, which is a problem when both roles are required to carry a lot of the underlying emotional weight of the story. It could also be down to a script that, for all its pedigree, feels crowded and like it has one too many ideas, and that this excess has cost any given idea the space to be interesting. 
But the real problem is with the job the story seems to be trying to solve. This is an odd thing to say. After all, the job is one of the basic and reflexive functions of a series like this. The Mad Woman in the Attic exists to be a character focus episode on Rani. Given that she’s not really had one since her debut, which was so focused on getting her to be a business-as-usual part of the story that she barely had time to develop as a character, this makes total sense. Rani needs to be fleshed out. If this season went by without a heavily Rani-focused episode it would be anomalous to the point of opening serious allegations of sexism.
But Rani has, if not a problem as a cast member, at least a problem as a character. She’s there to fill a narrative contrivance in a manner not dissimilar to how Sarah Jane herself is. And just as Sarah Jane proved oddly unsatisfying as the center of an emotional story in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, so does Rani here. Rani was designed to be a plucky adventuress. She was never really given any character traits beyond that. And so a story about her emotional turmoil is unsatisfying because her character was never really meant to have that. Fault Souad Faress all you want, but it’s not clear what she could have done with this script. Old Rani is defined only by her narrative wrongness – by the fact that she’s not the correct version of the character.
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